Oxygen is a pretty important component in the evolution of life on earth and Donald E. Canfield’s Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History hardback release will document it’s historical relevance right from its formation in the stars, through the major oxidation of earth and it’s modern day situation. It’s a lot of ground to cover, but if the ecologist pulls it all together well it could be one of the year’s most fascinating science books.
Oxygen will be published on hardback on the 10th December 2013, so it’ll be out just in time for a good geeky winter read or as a great Christmas present for science lovers everywhere. Rather surprisingly, considering the sheer breadth of time Canfield is looking at, it’s only 224 pages long, so while it’s bound to a weighty in parts, it isn’t going to be an absolute tome.
The recommended retail price is set to be £19.95 in the UK (£27.75 in the US), but it’s looking likely that there’ll be a fair few discount offers to get it cheaper with Amazon pricing it as £13.37 in the UK and Barnes & Noble have it priced as $21.95 in the US for pre-order at the time of writing. The paperback release won’t be out until much later in 2014, but with the offer prices it’s looking like a very reasonable hardcover option.
The book starts in the stars following the big bang as stars start to form, creating all of the oxygen that exists in a process called nuclear fusion as 4 helium atoms join together to form the atomic element of oxygen. While this is obviously a massive piece in the puzzle of our existence thanks to the lovely, breathable 20% of oxygen that floats in the air around us, but if you go back a few billion years Earth actually wasn’t an oxygenated planet.
It’s this beautiful story of oxygenation that makes up the heart of the book as it lays out the ground for the development of life as we know it from the oxygen parping cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that lit the touch paper. It’s not just this oxygenation event that the book cover as it also looks at the varying volumes of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, along with how and why they fluctuate and what process keep the levels in check to sustain life on the planet.
The scientists behind our understanding of the history of oxygen are key character’s in Cranfield’s Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History as they are the guys that provided a lot of the insight in the first place. However, it’s the narrative that he weaves around the billions of years of progression of oxygenation on Earth that makes the book stand out this Christmas. Without oxygen there would be no snow, no turkey, no Santa and apparently your forks would fuse together in the cutlery draw, so we’ve got a lot to thank it for.
